New year, new blog

I’ve put off this project for several months now, but I figured that I should do at least ONE productive thing at the start of the new year.

Journaling has always been both therapeutic and creative for me, so when blogging became a thing some years ago, I took to the web to try out this new platform for journaling.

I started out in LiveJournal. I had just graduated from college then and was looking for a job, so I mostly logged “a day in the life” or fandom entries. That was my first foray into the international online community, having made friends with LJ’ers all over the world. I stopped logging entries there when I realized I LIKED having an audience for my thoughts and opinions but the LJ community was not the audience I was looking for.

(Apparently my account is still alive and hallelujah I still remember the password!)

WordPress was a platform I was reading a lot of in LJ. It was the second platform after GreatestJournal that I tried. GJ looked and functioned so much like LJ that I was there only for a few months. WordPress was my next platform. I chose this over Blogspot because I saw that a lot of the niche bloggers I liked used this. Because I had set my sights on becoming “one of them,” I chose the platform they used.

I should have done my research first. I was way in over my head with the WP dashboard. As a person with ZERO computer programming or design skills or HTML/CSS know-how, I failed to maximize the options and possibilities that WP offered. In the end, I went back to chronicling days in my life or opinions on a standard-themed blog.

Now, however, I feel immense pressure to step my game up.

So here I am trying to find my way around the WP dashboard and building a new blog/site from scratch. Thankfully, the new themes make CSS dolts like me look like experts. I love how the things that confused me before are laid out already in templates, so now I finally understand all the gibberish I read in those Help articles all those years ago.

Thank you, WordPress, and thank you, theme makers!

Now, I need to continue re-learning how to put up and maintain a blog. Wish me luck!